crevasse

Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

n. A deep fissure, as in a glacier; a chasm.

n. A crack or breach in a dike or levee.

transitive v. To develop or cause to develop crevasses.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

n. A crack or fissure in a glacier or snow field; a chasm.

n. A discontinuity or “gap” between the accounted variables and an observed outcome.

v. To form crevasses.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English

n. A deep crevice or fissure, as in embankment; one of the clefts or fissure by which the mass of a glacier is divided.

n. A breach in the levee or embankment of a river, caused by the pressure of the water, as on the lower Mississippi.

from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

n. A fissure or crack: a term used by English writers in describing glaciers, to designate a rent or fissure in the ice, which may be of greater or less depth, and from an inch or two to many feet in width.

n. In the United States, a breach in the embankment or levee of a river, occasioned by the pressure of water, as in the lower Mississippi.

Twice I have owed safety to a snow bridge, and it seems to me that the chance of finding some obstruction or some saving fault in the crevasse is a good one, but I am far from thinking that such a chance can be relied upon, and it would be an awful situation to fall beyond the limits of the

As now the mass continues to advance, the crevasses must advance with it; and as it moves more rapidly toward the middle than on the margins, that end of the crevasse which is farthest removed from the projecting rock must move more rapidly also; the consequence is, that all the older lateral crevasses, after a certain time, point downward, while the fresh ones point upward.

In very high water an occasional break in a levee, call a "crevasse", may overflow a small local area, but with the present scientific skill and equipment, these breaks are generally closed promptly, with but little damage to land affected.

Among the most disastrous instances of the "crevasse" is that of May, 1816, when the river broke through, nine miles above New Orleans, destroying numbers of plantations, and inundating the back part of the city.